Jael said grimly, "You're overconfident, Mallow. You're ignoring the possibility of a popular rebellion." Mallow looked up, grim in his turn, "Once … - Isaac Asimov

Por ello, con el tiempo, los griegos tendieron a dividir a todo el mundo en dos grupos: ellos, los grecoparlantes, y los extranjeros, los que no hablaban griego. Para los griegos, los extranjeros parecían proferir sílabas sin sentido, que eran como decir "bar-bar-bar-bar" por el significado que tenían (al menos para los griegos). Así, los griegos llamaban a todos los que no eran griegos barbaroi, que significaba algo así como "gente que habla de manera extraña".

First, you refused to admit that there was a menace at all! Then you reposed an absolutely blind faith in the Emperor! Now you've shifted it to Hari Seldon. Throughout you have invariably relied on authority or on the past – never on yourselves. It amounts to a diseased attitude – a conditioned reflex that shunts aside the independence of your minds whenever it is a question of opposing authority. There seems no doubt ever in your minds that the Emperor is more powerful than you are, or Hari Seldon wiser. And that's wrong, don't you see? It isn't just you. It's the whole Galaxy. Pirenne heard Lord Dorwin's idea of scientific research. Lord Dorwin thought the way to be a good archaeologist was to read all the books on the subject – written by men who were dead for centuries. He thought that the way to solve archaeological puzzles was to weigh the opposing authorities. And Pirenne listened and made no objections. Don't you see that there's something wrong with that? And you men and half of Terminus as well are just as bad. We sit here,considering the Encyclopedia the all-in-all. We consider the greatest end of science is the classification of past data. It is important, but is there no further work to be done? We're receding and forgetting, don't you see? Here in the Periphery they've lost nuclear power. In Gamma Andromeda, a power plant has undergone meltdown because of poor repairs, and the Chancellor of the Empire complains that nuclear technicians are scarce. And the solution? To train new ones? Never! Instead they're to restrict nuclear power. Don't you see? It's Galaxy wide. It's a worship of the past. It's a deterioration – a stagnation!

Rabbi Loew of sixteenth-century Prague. He is supposed to have formed an artificial human being — a robot — out of clay, just as God had formed Adam out of clay. A clay object, however much it might resemble a human being, is “an unformed substance” (the Hebrew word for it is “golem”), since it lacks the attributes of life. Rabbi Loew, however, gave his golem the attributes of life by making use of the sacred name of God, and set the robot to work protecting the lives of Jews against their persecutors.